SALON

Tuesday, Aug 23, 2011 12:30 PM UTC

Orrin Hatch’s guide to avoiding a Tea Party primary challenge

The senior senator from Utah didn't have room to move right, so he went mean

By

Topics: Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, 2012 Elections, Tea Parties, War Room,

Orrin Hatch's guide to avoiding a Tea Party primary challengeOrrin Hatch

Orrin hatch used to be the symbol of how our American political system could, against the odds, still work for Americans. The rabidly conservative senator was proud to call the steadfastly liberal Sen. Ted Kennedy his personal friend. He is a symbol of how the Senate used to pride itself on civility trumping partisanship. No moderate he, Hatch was still able to see his political opponents as humans, and he could recognize where there was common ground to be sought. And that is why the Tea Parties hated him and wanted to primary him.

But Hatch got out of it! Somehow, against all odds, Rep. Jason Chaffetz decided not to run against Hatch in 2012, after going so far as to hold town halls outside his district to gauge support for a run.

Hatch’s poll numbers had begun to crawl up, though, and Chaffetz decided his sure-thing reelection was safer than battling an entrenched million-term senator.

Read Michelle Malkin’s reasons to vote against Hatch list. Most of it boils down to “he says nice things about Democrats.” That is bad and wrong, because Democrats are evil. So Hatch learned to abandon his entire life of being respectful and civil, as he was presumably brought up to be, in favor of lashing out angrily all the time and being “fiery.”

Use swears.

Orrin called the democratic healthcare reform plan “an awful piece of crap” and a dumb-ass program. Hatch is a 77-year-old Mormon, I don’t think he’s supposed to be talking like that?

Stop cooperating!

Being civil is what got Hatch into this mess in the first place, so while the healthcare negotiations dragged on, Hatch took to disingenuously bemoaning the absence of his good friend, the then-ailing Ted Kennedy, whose presence would’ve apparently magically made the bill more palatable. This allowed Hatch to have his cake of not cooperating while eating his cake of thinking of himself as something more respectable than a miserable old party functionary no longer allowed to stray from party dogma lest he lose the cushy position that has come to define his life since he’ll never make it onto the Supreme Court. So he joined the Senate GOP in making 60 votes the new standard for getting any business at all done, while pretending it had always been thus.

Suck up to the Tea Parties

They really love nothing more than to be flattered, the small angry minority of far-right Christian wingnuts who have declared themselves a grass-roots populist movement, and so Hatch pretends the people who screamed insults and threats at him last year are different from the wonderful Tea Partyers he has always supported.

“Rude” town hall attendees who had shouted at him last summer, he declared, “were not tea party people,” they were “other party people.”

Raise a shitload of money

And make it hard for your Tea people opponent to do the same. This seems to be what actually scared Chaffetz off, and it is obviously good advice for anyone running for anything.

So after you’ve finished spending the better part of a year completely discarding your entire carefully crafted public image as a gentleman legislator of the old school, make sure you have millions of dollars. Now you’re probably mostly safe from an insurgent candidate!

Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 28 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
FBI reportedly joins Bachmann campaign finance probe
231 points232 points | 14 comments
vote
Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills. "In an economy where we’re all in the same boat, one person’s spending is another person’s income. So when the government cuts spending, it reduces people’s income, leading to less business, more unemployment, and a vicious spiral of slowing down the economy."
221 points222 points | 172 comments
vote
Jon Karl makes things worse: He regrets “inaccurate” Benghazi email but says his story based on it “still entirely stands.” Really. ABC News?
202 points203 points | 30 comments
vote
“Jodorowsky’s Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was.
81 points82 points | 16 comments
vote
Austerity Kills: Brian McArdle, a 57-year-old man who had had two strokes and could barely walk, was found "fit for work" by a government subcontractor, and had his benefits stopped. He died the next day.
54 points55 points | 3 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations